A communications device can communicate with other communications devices over a communications network. The quality of a communication experienced by a user of the communications device is often dependent upon the network quality experienced by the communications device in the communications network. It can therefore be useful to monitor and/or improve the network quality experienced by the communications device.
A device in a Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network has a status bar showing the GSM network quality which is based on the signal strength currently received at the device. The determination of the signal strength and the conversion of this signal strength into a network quality do not always result in an accurate indication of the network quality. Furthermore, most devices do not provide access to network quality information to a user application, and even if they do then it is not possible to predict future quality. Additionally, the quality measure that they show might not be comparable across different devices.
It would be beneficial to improve the determination of the network quality.